04.01.16

Surprising elements — from a Duchamp readymade and postmodern tables to avant-garde music and architecture — are the seedlings with which 30-year-old Landon Metz sows his artistic philosophy. For Metz, whose studio resides in Bushwick, these are all materials that belong to the same creative ecosystem. They also provide fertile ground for his spare, lighter-than-air paintings, which tend toward the biomorphic and richly hued repeating patterns. His latest exhibition, open now through April 9th at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, centers around Metz’s affinity for the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis, one of the movement’s central figures.

02.18.13

To the extent that we cover art on Sight Unseen, it makes sense that we'd naturally gravitate towards action painting — artists may always have plenty to say about the relationship of their work to the viewer, or to philosophy, or to the context of art history, but most of the time we're interested in something a little more prosaic than that, like how they get their hands dirty, and why they've chosen one medium over another. With gestural works, it's all about the process, and the liminal moments just before and after materials cease to be ordinary and paintings transform into something more than the sum of their parts. The work of the Greenpoint-based artist Landon Metz is a perfect example: His paintings are about painting, and how colorful enamel shapes laid down on a tilted canvas will move and evolve as their surface interactions and drying times are influenced by factors like humidity, daylight, and temperature. Sight Unseen contributor Paul Barbera visited Metz's studio recently for Where They Create, and — oh lucky day! — he did our work for us, creating his own podcast interview with the artist which you can listen to after the jump.

03.09.20

Design, and its attendant signs of domestic life, played an even more outsized role than normal at last week's art shows in New York. At many galleries, it seemed that the booth furniture might drown out the works themselves, as with the ombré pieces on view at Peres Projects, or the erstwhile neon pink RO/LU benches at Parker Gallery. The best booth of the week by far, though, was by the London-based gallery Lyndsey Ingram, who handed over its design and curation to Georgie Hopton. Hopton in turn tapped her husband Gary Hume to share the joint booth, then kitted it out like a real home, complete with ruffled baseboards anchoring each color-blocked wall.

10.15.19

We've always been fans of exhibitions that put furniture in conversation with art, but often those exhibitions are a solo affair. On view currently at Galerie Derouillon in Paris, though, is an exhibition in which an artist and a furniture designer instead riff on one another's work: Called Conversation, the exhibition features furniture made by the French designer Frédéric Pellenq and paintings and objects by artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet.

08.04.18

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: IKEA re-releases vintage favorites from the '50s through the '90s, Céline debuts a new Miami flagship, and the lumpy terracotta furniture trend hits Urban Outfitters in record time.

07.09.18

Brooklyn artist Ethan Cook is sometimes referred to as a painter, but we've yet to find an instance of him actually putting a brush to canvas. When we first started following Cook's work, after an introduction in 2012 from Iko Iko in Los Angeles, he was manipulating canvases by way of bleaching and dyeing the fibers; he then moved on to combining hand-woven canvases with store-bought ones in a kind of super high-end, abstract patchwork. His work for the past few years, though, has involved making large-scale woven pieces entirely by hand on a four-harness floor loom — our favorite iteration yet.

06.02.18

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: great moments in color-blocking, an Instagram-induced existential crisis, and an iridescent shower that lifts a humdrum apartment renovation into the design stratosphere.

09.13.17

The last time Landon Metz showed at the Copenhagen art gallery Andersen's Contemporary, he created a series of stretched, amorphous canvases, each stained a deep indigo that reached seemingly past the edges of the frame, with many that wrapped around the gallery's walls or door frames. That series, he said, stemmed from an effort "to make the medium of painting more interactive and experiential, and to integrate it into the surrounding environment." His most recent exhibition for the Danish gallery, which opened late last month, takes that notion one step farther.

05.06.17

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: wishing we were at a design fair on the French Riviera, visiting some of our favorite designers at home, and ogling these new geometric textile abstractions by artist Brent Wadden.

03.07.17

We can't quite put our finger on what it was that made this year's Armory Arts Week feel so fresh. Was it the new venues? After all, NADA moved from Basketball City to Skylight Clarkson North, while Spring/Break moved from the old Post Office to an ex-Condé Nast office at 4 Times Square. Was it the fresh blood — the fact that NADA was even there at all, after years of coinciding with May's Frieze Fair? Or maybe it was simply the weather — we made the rounds on a gorgeously sunny Thursday that made the views at Spring Studios' Independent fair even more glorious. Whatever the case, we found much to love

10.06.17

If you mixed two of our favorite things together — hand-built, architectural, almost monolithic ceramics, and things in three dimensions that are traditionally conceived in two — you might get something akin to the body of work produced by the Spanish studio Formabesta in the short time they've been together.

09.18.17

Amir Nikravan's exhibition "Rational Design," on view now at Nathalie Karg gallery in New York, is the third exhibition we've featured this week exploring the relationship between painting and sculpture. But of all the artists we've written about, Nikravan seems the most interested in collapsing that boundary entirely.